#endangered art

[techdriveplay]

Art of the Brick Lego Exhibition Announces a Return to Melbourne

The record-breaking Art of the Brick Immersive Experience LEGO exhibition, that has become a global phenomenon, will return to Melbourne at The Showgrounds from April 14th 2024. Based on the work of Nathan Sawaya, a former New York City corporate lawyer turned world-renowned contemporary LEGO artist, The Art of the Brick offers an entirely new perspective on art. This unique exhibit version uses…

[squeeegs]

text from porter robinson's "goodbye to a world"

every single animal in this comic is extinct. it's not too late for the ones that are left.

edit: thanks @mudcrabmassacre for the correction, smilodon fatalis did not in fact go extinct in 1023 AD. the actual prediction is around 10,000 years ago - I think i may have missed a zero or two.

[extinctionstories]

On April 19th, 1987, a bird known as Adult Condor 9 was captured in the Bitter Creek National Wildlife Refuge, near Bakersfield, California. After decades ravaged by the threats of lead-poisoning and pesticide exposure, and intense debate over the ethics of captivity, it had been determined that captive breeding was the final hope to save a species. As his designation might suggest, AC-9 was the ninth condor to be captured for the new program; he was also the last.

As the biology team transported the seven-year-old male to the safety of the San Diego Wild Animal Park, his species, the California Condor, North America's largest bird, became extinct in its native range. It was Easter Sunday—a fitting day for the start of a resurrection.

At the time of AC-9's capture, the total world population of California condors constituted just twenty-seven birds. The majority of them represented ongoing conservation attempts: immature birds, taken from the wild as nestlings and eggs to be captive-reared in safety, with the intention of re-release into the wild. Now, efforts turned fully towards the hope of captive breeding.

Captive breeding is never a sure-fire bet, especially for sensitive, slow-reproducing species like the condor. Animals can and do go extinct even when all individuals are successfully shielded from peril and provided with ideal breeding conditions. Persistence in captivity is not the solution to habitat destruction and extirpation—but it can buy valuable time for a species that needs it.

Thankfully, for the California condor, it paid off.

The birds defied expectations, with an egg successfully hatched at the San Diego Zoo the very next year. Unlike many other birds of prey, which may produce clutches of up to 5 hatchlings, the California condor raises a single chick per breeding season, providing care for the first full year of its life, and, as a consequence, often not nesting at all in the year following the birth of a chick. This, combined with the bird's slow maturation (taking six to eight years to start breeding), presented a significant challenge. However, biologists were able to exploit another quirk of the bird's breeding cycle: its ability to double-clutch.

Raising a single offspring per year is a massive risk in a world full of threats, and the California condor's biology has provided it with a back-up plan: in years when a chick or egg has been lost, condors will often re-nest with a second egg. To take advantage of this tendency, eggs were selectively removed from birds in the captive breeding program, which would then lay a replacement, greatly increasing their reproduction rate.

And what of the eggs that were taken? The tendency of hatchlings to imprint is well-known, and the intention from the very beginning was for the birds to one day return to the wild—an impossibility for animals acclimated to humans. And so, puppets were made in the realistic likeness of adult condors, and used by members of the conservation team to feed and nurture the young birds, mitigating the risk of imprintation on the wrong species.

By 1992, the captive population had more than doubled, to 64 birds. That year, after an absence of five years, the first two captive-bred condors were released into their ancestral home. Many other releases followed, including the return of AC-9 himself in 2002. Thanks to the efforts of zoos and conservationists, as of 2024 there are 561 living California condors, over half of which fly free in the wilds of the American West.

The fight to save the California condor is far from over. The species is still listed as critically endangered. Lead poisoning (from ingesting shot/bullets from abandoned carcasses) remains the primary source of mortality for the species, with tagged birds tested and treated whenever possible. Baby condors are fed bone chips by their parents, likely as a calcium supplement—but, to a condor, bits of bone and bits of plastic can be indistinguishable, and dead nestlings have been found with stomachs full of trash.

There's hope, though. There are things we can change, things we can counteract and stop from happening in the future. It was a human hand that created this problem, and it will take a human hand to fix it. Hope is only gone when the last animal breathes its last breath—and the California condor is still here.

-

This painting is titled Puppet Rearing (California Condor), and is part of my series Conservation Pieces, which focuses on the efforts and techniques used to save critically endangered birds from extinction. It is traditional gouache, on 22x30" paper.

[arthistoryanimalia]

#WorldOkapiDay :

Engelbert Schoner (Germany, 1906-1977)

Okapis, 1961

colour woodcut, 64 x 47 cm

https://www.mutualart.com/Artwork/Okapis/AADC3C37ECA720A5A521DBAB78C69087

[tea-slur]

The Thylacine Sew-On Patch is now available on my Ko-fi shop!!

You can find my shop using this link here, or by using the linktree in my bio!!

[awkwardbirdsdreaming]

Bird #29 - the Bali myna (CR)

Endemic to the province of Bali in Indonesia, this striking starling is endangered mostly due to poaching for the caged bird market. There is a large number of birds in captivity, so they won't go extinct anytime soon, but the wild population is estimated to be less than 100.

Have you ever noticed there's a lot of light-coloured birds with dark wing tips and tails? (Seagulls, terns, pelicans, long-tailed tits, etc...)

This is because feathers with melanin (a dark pigment) are more resistant to damage than feathers without pigment! The wing tips and tail are susceptible to being damaged while birds flap about, so these areas tend to have more melanin to protect them. Now if you see a bird with dark wings and tail you'll know why :)

[nibmoss]

did you hear there’s a new short film that is GAY?? LESBIAN, even???

AND it’s filmed in a minority language?? a CELTIC language, one might say??

AND that it’s available for FREE, with SUBTITLES in both irish AND english??

“FAN” (2024) dir. cúnla ní bhraonáin morris

watch here 🫶

[ketrinadrawsalot]

The Galápagos penguin is endemic to the Galápagos Islands and is the rarest penguin. Because they can't breed when ocean surface temperatures are above 25C, they're especially affected by climate change. Ecotourism is also a threat, due to littering and irresponsible birdwatching.

[princema-k]

Can you make flora mad please 🤲🤲 she deserves it

couldn't decide between pouty or dead serious so u get both

[lotus-lamps]

The things i do for a chocolate bar oh my god

(Lear’s macaws for my science project thats literally only worth 20 points. I spedran this all in one day and its 3 am right now and i have a test tomorrow i hate school)

[possumnest]

ENDANGERED IN MICHIGAN [redraw]

1. karner blue 2. marbled salamander 3. indiana bat 4. american chestnut 5. canada lynx 6. mitchell's satyr 7. redside dace 8. copperbelly water snake 9. spotted turtle 10. lake sturgeon 11. peregrine falcon 12*. grey wolf 13. northern riffleshell 14. michigan monkey-flower 15. painted trillium 16. hine's emerald dragonfly 17. piping plover 18. clubshell

*listed as endangered in the USA, special concern in MI

[extinctionstories]

It was never a common species, the blue-grey warbler that locals called the jack pine bird. A belated discovery among American birds, it was undescribed by science until the mid 19th century—and then, known only on the basis of a single specimen. The bird's wintering grounds in the Caribbean would eventually fulfill the demands of collectors and museums, but the intricacies of its lifecycle remained a mystery for decades, the first nest only found in 1903. As the already-rare bird became rarer, people could only guess at why. There were just so few birds to look for, their breeding habitat inscrutable amidst the dense, impassable woodland of their Midwestern home. The one clue was the most apparent thing about the bird: its affinity with the jack pine (Pinus banksiana).

Over time, more nests were found—not in the eponymous trees, as might be expected for a songbird, but on the ground at their feet. Data points converged, leading to the realization that not only did the bird nest almost exclusively in proximity to the scrubby pines, but only utilized trees that fell within a specific range: new growth, between five and fifteen feet tall, with branches that swept shelteringly close to the ground. Subsequently, it would be noticed that the greatest volume of specimen collection for the bird had corresponded with years in which historically significant wildfires had impacted the Midwest—fires that, for decades afterwards, had been staunchly suppressed. The pieces fell into place, like jack pine seeds, whose cones open only under the heat of a blaze.

With the bird's total population having dwindled to the low hundreds, a program of prescribed burns, clearcutting, and replanting was instituted, with many acres of land purchased and devoted to the preservation and maintenance of suitable breeding habitat. Concurrently, efforts were made to protect the vulnerable bird against brood parasitism by the brown-headed cowbird.

When the first federal list of protected species was put forward in 1966, the name of the small grey warbler was inscribed beside birds such as the Kauai ʻōʻō and the Dusky Seaside Sparrow.

The ʻōʻō, last of the genus Moho, would be removed from the list in 2023 due to extinction, after thirty-six years without a sighting.

The endling Dusky Seaside Sparrow, a male named Orange Band, would die of old age in captivity in 1987, with his species being delisted three years later.

in 2019, fifty-two years after the creation of the Endangered Species Protection Act, the name of Kirtland's warbler, too, was removed from the list: it had been determined that, with a population now numbering nearly 5000, the jack pine bird could be considered safely stable.

Conservationists continue to work to preserve the breeding habitat of Kirtland's Warbler in the midwestern US, as well as its winter roosts in the Bahamas and neighboring islands (though selective logging has replaced actual burning in recent years, due to the dangers posed by unpredictable fires). It's the kind of effort that it takes to undo the damage we've caused to the planet and its creatures—the kind of hope that we need, to not give up on them, or on ourselves.

-

The title of this piece is Prescribed Burn (Kirtland's Warbler). It is traditional gouache on 18x24" watercolor paper, and is part of my series Conservation Pieces, which focuses on efforts made to save critically endangered birds from extinction.

[lizardsaredinosaurs]

You know I'm in trouble when there aren't any photographs of me.

Himalayan Quail (Ophrysia superciliosa)

Western Himalayas, Uttarakhand, India

Status: Critically Endangered, possibly extinct

Threats: unknown

---

It hasn't been recorded by Western science since 1876 but hey, maybe nobody has asked the locals? (that's actually very possible)

[arthistoryanimalia]

Happy #WorldOkapiDay!

Here is the first published image of an Okapi from a 1901 watercolor by ZSL fellow Sir Harry Johnston. Quite good #SciArt considering he hadn't yet seen a live one and only had a skin, skull, and verbal descriptions to work with! It was given the scientific name Okapia johnstoni in his honor. ("Okapi" was derived from its Indigenous name "o'api" from the local Lese tribe.)

See the plate in context with the original text here: https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/31888385#page/52/

🚨The Okapi is currently listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List.

[zephyrenn]

Super excited to share my Vaquita piece for the new 2024 issue of Sea Unseen Zine (@seaunseenzine)! There are over 60 gorgeous marine-themed artworks in this issue, and all proceeds go towards the Australian Marine Conservation Society 🌊🐋🦈🦐

Keep reading below to learn a bit more about this small, critically endangered cetacean!

At just around 95 lbs in mass and 4.5 feet in length, the Vaquita (Phocoena sinus) is the world's smallest living cetacean! Like many other porpoises, they feed on a range small fish, squid, and crustaceans within their locality. They have an incredibly small range, known only to reside in shallow waters in upper Gulf of California. Due to their rarity, not much else is known about this species.

Sadly, the Vaquita is on the brink of extinction. Recent estimates suggest only 10 individuals remain. Illegal fishing operations result in these little cetaceans becoming bycatch, and is the biggest cause of their decline.

Current conservation efforts for the Vaquita seek to mitigate threats such as fisheries, pollution, and habitat destruction. Hopefully, with enough protection and patience, the population of this incredible animal will stabilize and even recover 💙

[holts-knees]

Special interest infodump time [facilitated by an art challenge I'm taking part in over on my instagram] this episode: The Saimaa Ringed Seal! The Saimaa Ringed seal is a subspecies of ringed seal endemic to Lake Saimaa in Finland. They have evolved separately from other species of glacial ringed seals for nearly 10,000 years after being separated in the forming of Lake Saimaa during post glacial rebound at the end of the last ice age. That prolonged and continued period of isolation has caused them to have broken off into their own, incredibly rare geographically specific and small numbered morphology [other animals to exhibit this include the Devil's Hole Pupfish of death valley]. Due to this nature, while they face endangerment due to the same reasons as many other seals [bycatch mortality, hunting, pollution etc] they also face it purely from a rarity angle, isolated species populations in the sub-1,000s are always going to be incredibly delicate by virture of not having the "padding" of large count numbers on their side.

That said! Conservationists in Finland work closely with the government to do their best to make sure these adorable freshwater seals have the best shot they can at sticking around, and Metsähallitus was very excited to report that this year was a record-high year for Saimaa Ringed Seal pups! Noting that their annual census for 2023 counted 100 pups [the highest count they have ever had! And a HUGE number considering the overall population of the species is estimated around 410 total seals] The organization thinks it's possible the continued increase may be caused by recent net fishing bans in certain parts of the lake allowing more seals to survive to reproductive age, and hope the bans can continue to expand to further parts of the lake as well to increase this encouraging and exciting momentum. Onnea teille pikku hyljit!! 🦭🩵🇫🇮